Those are big numbers, right? That alone should convince you that these conditions are prevalent enough to be taken seriously. These are not a few fringe crackpots convincing themselves that they’re sick because they want the attention.
This is a global health crisis. This is something REAL.
The Mix
Those numbers sound like something you might read on a particularly distressing health pamphlet. Something to be consumed, worried about briefly and then forgotten. But, thankfully, Is It All In Your Head? isn’t just about trying to scare you with statistics.
Dr. O’Sullivan uses her book to make a reasoned, yet impassioned case for why the world needs to change how it thinks about the relationship between our physical and psychological health. (And that’s coming from a neurologist.)
The actual meaning of the word psychosomatic has to do with “physical symptoms that occur for psychological reasons.” This doesn’t mean that those symptoms aren’t real. Anyone who has experienced them can tell you — the pain is real, the fatigue is real, the discomfort is real.
But it does mean that those symptoms can’t always be easily explained away by tests or examinations, and there’s a stigma attached to that.
The patient hears that their tests came back fine, but they KNOW they’re still feeling ill. A doctor can’t find the root cause of a patient’s pain, so they start to doubt that it exists. Or they label it as “psychosomatic,” which, unfortunately, has a certain connotation.
It has that prefix “psycho” on there. It makes the patient feel like they’re being accused of something. That they could snap themselves out of it if they stopped willing themselves to be sick. But that’s not how these conditions work.
It doesn’t mean that the symptoms aren’t real. It just means that the symptoms might need to be treated on a psychological level more than a physical level.
That is REAL. It’s just a different way of thinking.
Spoon University
Throughout Is It All In Your Head?, Dr. O’Sullivan collects a series of case studies discussing real patients who have been slapped with that psychosomatic label.
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